F-35B grounded following fuel leak during takeoff

By By SUE BOOK - New Bern Sun Journal

Published: Sunday, January 20, 2013 at 01:59 PM.

He said NAVAIR typically grounds an aircraft fleet after an incident.

“When they get an incident, they look at it and say ‘Stop flying the airplane until I get a chance to see what happened,’” Blot said. “It could be a one-of-a-kind incident and you go on. It could mean this has to be fixed. Some evaluations take less than a day. Others take much longer.”

Aircraft at Cherry Point Air Station are supposed to be replaced with mostly the F-35B variant of the Lightning II, but production of the aircraft in a contract with Lockheed was in 2001 is more than 70 percent over original budget, now at about $395.7 billion.

While Cherry Point is last on the list to receive F-35B squadrons with none expected to be based there before about 2022, the Navy aircraft rework facility Fleet Readiness Center East has been tapped to work on the planes. If development and procurement stays on track, one could arrive there for modification as early as 2014.

HAVELOCK — F-35B aircraft under evaluation were grounded Friday after a fuel line part failed and caused a Wednesday testing takeoff to be aborted.

The Pentagon’s official “red stripe” suspends flight operations until an engineering investigation is complete for the short take off and vertical landing version of the plane being developed to replace most Marine Corps aircraft.

According to information provided from NAVAIR by the military legislative adviser for Rep. Walter B. Jones, R-Farmville, the takeoff was safely aborted but the fueldraulic line failure caused a significant fuel leak during takeoff.

Harry Blot, retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and a former program manager with Lockheed Martin’s JSF development, said the malfunction is something that “comes as part of the analysis.”

“It’s good that if something was going to break, nobody got hurt and the airplane wasn’t damaged,” he said.

He said the next step is figuring out why the part failed.

“It just came out of maintenance. Was it something somebody did wrong or something wrong with the design or manufacture apt to recur?” he said. “They have to sort it out.”

He said NAVAIR typically grounds an aircraft fleet after an incident.

“When they get an incident, they look at it and say ‘Stop flying the airplane until I get a chance to see what happened,’” Blot said. “It could be a one-of-a-kind incident and you go on. It could mean this has to be fixed. Some evaluations take less than a day. Others take much longer.”

Aircraft at Cherry Point Air Station are supposed to be replaced with mostly the F-35B variant of the Lightning II, but production of the aircraft in a contract with Lockheed was in 2001 is more than 70 percent over original budget, now at about $395.7 billion.

While Cherry Point is last on the list to receive F-35B squadrons with none expected to be based there before about 2022, the Navy aircraft rework facility Fleet Readiness Center East has been tapped to work on the planes. If development and procurement stays on track, one could arrive there for modification as early as 2014.